Portraits of Greatness

Photographer Mark Selinger captures a story in each portrait

August/September 2018

photo: Mark Seliger

Muhammad Ali, photographed in New YorkCity in 2004.

Over the last three decades, Mark Seliger has photographed just about every American icon—Louisville’s Muhammad Ali and Macon, Georgia’s Little Richard among them. In doing so, for publications such as Rolling Stone and GQ, the Amarillo, Texas–born lensman has himself become venerated. Last year, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery added his work to its permanent collection, a legacy on display in his new book, Mark Seliger Photographs (Abrams). “I believe there is a responsibility to take a picture that’s never been taken before,” Seliger says in the introduction, “to tell a story that’s never been told.”